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Before the pandemic, Westminster Christian School junior Phillip Newcomm volunteered at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital. He started volunteering there his freshman year and kept going until COVID restrictions kicked in.
When he started, he’d greet people coming into the hospital and direct them to where they needed to go.
“They would station us, depending on the day, and depending on different entrances,” he says. “Whether people would come up to us, or we would notice that they were lost, we’d ask them if they needed help.”
He spent two years as a greeter and then moved to biomedical engineering.
“I helped prepare transport for different ventilators, monitors—different types of monitors,” he says. “Basically, whatever is needed to go to the NICU or the ICU. They order it, I prepare it and take it to the room.”
Newcomm was interested in going into medicine and jumped at the chance to apply to the programs for teen volunteers.
“I got accepted and I started,” he says. “It’s been good for me. To interact with people and to help people. It’s been good.”
Newcomm is working to start a club at Westminster that would work with the hospital.
“We know right now, more than ever, these kids need people to help them,” he says.
Club members of WCS Kids for Kids would put together videos, crafts, and other things to entertain the sick children.
“To hopefully make the kids feel better,” he says.
His freshman year, Newcomm and three friends made sandwiches for Feed My Sheep, a program that feeds the homeless.
“My friends and I led a food drive that made and packaged sandwiches,” he says. “We did ham and turkey sandwiches. We created a system, almost an assembly line, where we created sandwiches.”
Newcomm estimates they made approximately 500 sandwiches.
This was not his first time helping feed the homeless. He and his family volunteered at the Chapman Partnership for the Homeless throughout his middle school years and into the start of high school.
“I did that around six or seven times,” he says.
When they went to the Chapman Partnership facility, the adults made the food.
“We’d help distribute utensils and plates,” he says. “During Christmas time we’d hand out candy canes to the people walking in.”
Newcomm is also in the Westminster Vision Club, a WCS club that collects discarded eye glasses and distributes them to people in need.
He’s also a member of the National Honor Society, the English Honor Society, the Science National Honor Society, Rho Kappa and Mu Alpha Theta.
As a freshman and sophomore, Newcomm played basketball at WCS. He added lacrosse his sophomore year and started playing lacrosse exclusively his junior year. This year’s lacrosse team had its best season ever, making it to the district finals.
Now that he’s at the end of this junior year his attention is turning to college applications.
He recently went on a college tour of schools in the Southeast, from Florida to the Carolinas. He looked at the University of Florida, Florida State, the University of North Carolina, Duke, Clemson, Davidson, Georgia Tech, Emory and Wake Forest. He’s still debating between business and medicine for his major.
This past summer, he worked at his father’s medical offices. He found the work interesting because of his interest in medicine as a career.
“I was able to watch him work,” he says. “I worked in the front office, helping the nurses with whatever they needed. I ran the system where they uploaded the vaccine information online.”
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
